Human baggage vs. emotional vampires.

Lesson for the day: The correct usage of the terms "human baggage" and "emotional vampires." Never interchange the two!

Joey has a term for people who used to occupy your past but now you don't even need (or in extreme cases, recognize): "human baggage." People say that the term makes it sound as though they were once extremely useful, but now are useful no longer. Others might even say that "human baggage" suggests that these people were objectified or boxed into their functionality. Well, I don't think that that's what Joey meant. In fact, I believe that it is to the contrary. People who are "human baggage" are people whom you used to think had decent qualities in them. In fact, these people are those whom you considered once upon a time as "friends," those whom you treated subjectively. Unfortunately for you, these people managed to destroy the friendship in a single blow: either they managed to misunderstand you, or they managed to fuck up an aspect of your life, or they managed to create a fool out of you. Hence, you decide to ignore them, or get rid of them, or just think that they never even existed in your life. Once you succeed in doing this, then you have just gotten rid of your "human baggage." "Good riddance," as most of us would say.

I find myself relating this to a similar type of people: the "emotional vampires." Thankfully, I stopped myself short of equating "human baggage" with "emotional vampires." For me, emotional vampires have teeth. They suck the living joy out of your life. Either by boring you to death, or by creating a non-negligible mess, or by acquiring what you are rightfully entitled to, the means do not matter; what matters is that they have managed to take something away from you. Human baggage, on the other hand, have no teeth. They just lie there as a dead weight. They don't really affect you. Descartes would disagree, but for me, they are non-entities. Or if they are entities, they are desperate, laughable entities. Of course, they once managed to do something that disrupted your life. Coming back or bouncing back from the damage they have caused is easy, though, and treating them as the non-entities that they really are is easier still.

In fact, I think "human baggage" is too kind a word. "Non-human garbage" is more like it. Note that I used "non-human" instead of "inhuman." Inhuman people have teeth, similar to emotional vampires; non-human garbages have no worth whatsoever. Equating "non-human garbages" to "emotional vampires" will be an insult to the latter, and hence must be stopped in its usage immediately.

That is my lesson for the day.